Credit is now a social utility - so regulate the bastards!

This could be either a short blog or a real long one. But I feel a rant coming on about the credit card companies and how they rape us with the blessing of governments who believe that, God Forbid!, government has no place in telling the marketplace what it can and can't do.

Credit card companies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in making credit and bank cards ubiquitous, so much a part of everyday life that they can't be gone without. In 2007, they spent $19 billion in North America alone to market themselves. Their marketing works. These are very serious people!

I'm all for government staying out of the marketplace, as long as the product we're talking about isn't essential to life. When it's just a choice about whether or not you want a widget in your life, why should we get in the way of the competitive marketplace's ability to create, distribute, price and market various brands of widgets...as long as the widget isn't something like health care, clean drinking water, electricity, natural gas or...here it comes!...bank and credit cards.

These days you simply have to have a card or you can't rent a car, reserve a hotel, fly anywhere, buy things on the internet or, sometimes and quite ironically, prove your identity when you write a cheque.

I believe in tight regulation of mass utilities like gas, electricity, water and the like. You can short circuit arguments about pros and cons of government regulation versus the free market by looking at the not-so-long-ago privatization of electricity in Alberta. Within a few short years, the price had shot from 3 cents per kwh to something like 11 cents. And remember, the electricity producers made money at 3 cents!

Back to credit cards, though. Now that the companies have succeeded in making the posession of a credit card a necessity, the whole business is, in my mind, now a social utility and worthy of very tight federal government regulation.

• Interest rates should be capped.
• The fees that credit card companies charge businesses (currently 2% and more, an amount that gets added by the business right back into its prices, which affects everyone including those who pay cash) should be hammered back down to the 0.33% level charged by federally-regulated Australian credit card companies. (Just think about that...the Aussie credit card companies still make money charging businesses 600% less than our credit card companies do!)
• Credit card companies shouldn't be allowed to contractually prevent business owners from giving a rebate to customers who buy with cash.
• And fine-print-based, bait-and-switch promotions that suck customers into paying oodles more interest penalties on outstanding balances should be outlawed.

Regulate the suckers!

What the hell is government for, except to serve and protect the people?

The basic problem here is that current politicians (Conservatives all!) pay lip service to serving the people, but when they act, they do so to protect people...in business.

It won't grow if they don't know.

Recently, the Globe and Mail, Canada's Torontocentric newspaper, did a great article about how kids these days just aren't interested in studying science beyond high school because careers in science are not attractive to them. The article mentioned many reasons, among them that there are 'sexier' occupations to aspire to in the IT world, that research funding is iffy, and a few others.

One thing the article skipped (I wonder why?) has to do with the massive downsizing that newsrooms across Canada have suffered in recent years. I'm not talking about radio station or most TV newsrooms...they've always been second-rate, staffed as they are with Kens and Barbies who don't know what a real story is unless someone else tells them (a PR person's dream). I'm talking about the major market newspapers.

I recently had a very enlightening talk with a man who spent more than 20 years reporting (very well, I must say) for a major Western Canadian newspaper and who thankfully took a buy-out a couple of years ago. He told me his old newsroom is a shadow of its former self after massive budget cuts. In proportion to its city's population growth, the newsroom has about half the reporting staff today as it had when he began his career. He told me that 'beats' that used to have two or more people assigned now have just one reporter, and that the assigned reporters are pulled away constantly to handle the latest sensational police & fire-type emergencies. They just don't have time to develop contacts and investigate what their contacts tell them, either on or off the record.

In my day (more than 30 years ago), The Edmonton Journal assigned me to a medical beat that included a hefty time commitment to pure medical research as opposed to the politics of medicine which at the time were comparatively tepid. This was decades before Edmonton developed its true muscle in medical research, when the field was just finding itself. The paper saw the possibilities, however, and dedicated the nearly-full time of one of its (many at the time) reporters to share with the community what was happening, primarily in the labs at the University of Alberta.

The newspaper's vision and my subsequent efforts resulted in many interesting stories about research and the people conducting it. Among the most memorable to me was the world-leading transplant immunology research being done by Dr. John Dossitor. His discoveries about the 'mechanics' of tissue rejection set the stage for huge leaps in organ transplantation.

So, back to my main point.

Kids these days, and those parents involved enough with their kids' lives to be positive influences on their career choices, are media-smart. If the information is out there, they'll find it, whether it's in print or on the web. But because of the huge cutbacks in major newsroom staffing levels, no one is out there digging to find the great stories that must be happening every day in the worlds of scientific research. The result is that their world is not being provided with the information about, and the excitement in, scientific research to stimulate their imaginations.

No information, no interest.

No interest, fewer new scientists.

Fewer scientists, less government commitment to funding.

Less funding, less research 'action'

Less action, even less reason for media interest in research.

It's a vortex, and I fear this one is headed down the drain.